Literary Critiques
written by me (while in Uni)
Critiques:
This GIF is irrelevant, I just love the movie The Fifth Element....
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Disney Damage and Princess Culture
The Dark Realities of Objectification and Repressive Ideologies
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Writing Preview: In her re-imagining of the classic children’s fable Bluebeard, Angela Carter uses lavish imagery to maintain the child-like, magical view of the world we have always known, containing the same unethical messages we have been spoon fed all our lives, while heightening the sexual explicitness and phallic imagery. She does so in order to reveal to us what our common notions of what we desire or have been told to desire really are, lies, methods of giving up our power willingly without realizing that these ideologies damn us, weaken us, commodify us, and give our sense of selves up to Man, the overbearing Patriarchy...
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Ripping LaohuHyphenated identity in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Ken Liu’s Paper Menagerie
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Writing Preview: In Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, and Ken Liu’s short story, Paper Menagerie, we are presented with two different cases of hyphenated identity. Looking to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, we can find a working definition for hyphenated identity...
Du Bois is stating that there is in fact no true consciousness, and that the minority is able to see the dominant society more consistently, especially the contradictions in actions versus ideals. I believe that this is especially prominent amongst children of color, like the two protagonists Philip and Jack, who both struggle to accept their hyphenated identities in different ways, with generational differences and ideas of assimilation playing a significant role. In Roth’s novel, the main character, Philip, struggles with being Jewish in an ever growing fascist American society, while the main character in Liu’s short story, Jack, struggles with being Asian-American, half Chinese and half White, in Connecticut. The two boys are products of their surroundings, the culturally confusing Americanism that comes with the idea of the Melting Pot. Both boys, in their early childhoods, are unaware of their differences in the greater picture of ideal “Americanism” in society until they become forcibly awakened to the fact that they have a cultural and or racial “otherness...” |
A Journey through time and spaceDual Identity as a response to collective trauma in Sherman Alexie’s Flight and Claire Light’s Abducted by Aliens
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Writing Preview: In Sherman Alexie’s Flight, and Claire Light’s Abducted by Aliens, we a presented with two different representations of generational conflict as well as unique responses to collective trauma through the individual experience of two narrators who are not directly affected by the experiences in which the acknowledged traumas derive. Both authors use devices common to speculative fiction that break from reality to defamiliarize our present-day issues of nationalism and identity; time travel is used in Flight in order for the narrator to bridge together the histories and disconnections between his dual ancestry, while space travel and alien abduction are used in Abducted by Aliens so that the narrator can become the generational bridge for her family in response to the experience of losing history. Both the novel and short story combine supernatural elements with a compressed view of historical events to recognize and come to terms with historical and family trauma. Dual identity becomes a response to collective trauma in Sherman Alexie’s Flight and Claire Light’s Abducted by Aliens. In this essay, I will discuss how trauma, directly or indirectly experienced, shapes identity in both works...
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A Marxist Reading of The Great GatsbyIt’s a horse… It’s a golden statue…It’s an objectified woman
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Writing Preview: In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is not only the embodiment of the American Dream’s failure to improve the lives of the proletariat class but a representative of capital itself. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy and obtaining her favor is a direct result of his desire to escape the proletariat class. The new value she would create for him is a status symbol, a ticket into the elite group that she belongs to, the bourgeois. Consequently, I will argue that The Great Gatsby is...
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Wicked Wives and CrossdressersA close reading of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Or What You Will
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Writing Preview: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, we have seen the emergence of many kinds of love, and with that love, there is always a price. Whether it be one’s sovereignty over another or one’s voice, it is the nature of love to be given so long as something else is taken away. Marriage rarely ever had to do with romantic love in the Middle Ages, and sex was meant for procreation and not pleasure. Such was the ideals of the church, and to go against the church was a sin in itself. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, his most complex and fully realized character is The Wife of Bath...
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Austen, Antigua, and MarriageA close reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
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Writing Preview Mansfield Park is not only a classic but the most controversial of Austen’s novels. The novel is actually a critique of the role of Antigua and the use of slave labor disguised as one that simply centers on the Domestic space: the country home of Sir and Lady Bertram. The home in Mansfield Park only survives directly because of Sir Bertram’s nefarious activities in Antigua, and the family rarely acknowledges how they are capable of living so lavishly. Fanny Price, niece to Lady Bertram, the daughter of her sister Frances, who married below her family’s standards just for love: Fanny is the only character in the novel that seems to want to know more about Antigua and Sir Bertram’s plantation there...
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Robinson Crusoe: Castaway or Economic man?A Marxist reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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Writing Preview: According to Investopedia, Homo economicus, or economic human, “is the figurative human being characterized by the infinite ability to make rational decisions,” and it has often been considered that The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a novel which illustrates the principals of economic man. One cannot take on this argument without first considering the influences that the author, Daniel Defoe, was exposed to in his lifetime. The works of philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke would have been well known by Defoe, and ideas such as popular sovereignty, the social contract method, and the state of nature would definitely have been on his mind while writing his novel. It can be said that fear is a rational reaction to the unknown, and so the unwillingness to let go of one’s familiar activities can be very understandable...
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Nature Always Wins A close reading of a passage from Thomas Hardy’s The return of the Native
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Writing Preview: Nature always wins. This idea, this fact, is generally known, and it was obviously one that Thomas Hardy knew well in the late 19th century. His novels, especially The Return of the Native, explore questions such as ‘are people important?’ or ‘is space indifferent to what we do to it?’ and in the passage I have selected to close read I believe these questions can be answered. The passage’s images of decay and failed cultivation, long sentences, and insertion of a characters observation illustrates the novel’s overarching theme: the pointlessness of life...
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Gifs are not mine.
Gifs are not mine.